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Banned Words List Carries Its First Emoticon 333

Posted by CmdrTaco from the bet-they-have-power-in-the-upper-penninsula dept.
DynaSoar writes "Lake Superior State University in Michigan's Upper Peninsula ('The land of four seasons: June, July, August and Winter') has just published its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Besides such unsurprising inclusions such as 'green' corporations being 'game changing' due to concern with their 'carbon foot print,' this year's list contains an emoticon for the first time — not a smiley face or variant, but the 'heart' symbol made from the characters 'less than' and 'three.' It's perhaps a sign of the evolution of language, or at least of this volunteer linguistic watchdog group, that a symbol compounded of two characters, neither of them a letter, is considered not only a word, but a particularly egregious one."
Programming

Reuse Code Or Code It Yourself? 429

Posted by kdawson from the good-or-great dept.
eldavojohn writes "I began coding for a project that had simple requirements for my employer — Web services and a test application for them. But requirements have been creeping, as they always do. Initially I had decided to use the Spring Framework with Hibernate. And I re-used a lot of libraries that made things simple and quick for me. The new requests coming in involve capabilities beyond those of the frameworks. Now, I used to be told that good programmers write code and great programmers reuse code. It's starting to look like I would have saved myself a whole lot of time if I had written the database transaction using JDBC instead of Hibernate — now that I'm married to this object model framework, some of this stuff doesn't look doable. So what is better for the majority of software projects out there: reuse code, or code from scratch? What elements or characteristics of a problem point to one option over the other?"

Comment Re:I'm only going to say (Score 2, Informative) 1912

by lluBdeR (#25628291) Attached to: Discuss the US Presidential Election

You're exactly right: That is most likely how America would implement socialized medicine. It's also the reason you're in this mess in the first place.

I live in Ontario (Canada). We have socialized medicine. I go the doctor of my choice and OHIP pays for it. I go to whatever hospital I need to, get whatever needs doing done and OHIP pays for it. I can have tests done at whatever lab is convenient for me and OHIP pays for it.

Are our waiting rooms full? Yes, for two reasons: Free systems are abused and people are stupid. Instead of using the second hour they're sitting in emergency to ponder whether or not they really need to be there, they go off on half-cocked rants and diatribes that Americans misunderstand and use to fuel the anti-socialized camps. Notice how neither reason was government inefficiency?
Games

Striking Writers May Work on Games 124

Posted by Zonk from the fewer-hackneyed-cliches-sounds-like-a-good-thing dept.
The ongoing Writer's Guild strike may soon impact even the games industry. While most of the copy writers working on games are not a part of the guild, via Eurogamer comes a Variety article about a possible Hollywood writer's migration to other media. "While the WGA has made no secret that it would like to eventually cover vidgame writing, it hasn't pushed the issue yet and is allowing members to work on games during the strike. 'It has been an interesting shift," says one tenpercenter who focuses on vidgames. "The literary agents are now saying, 'Why don't we get our clients over there during the strike?' even though in the past they thought the money wasn't good enough or the work is too demanding.'"

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